Raising awareness of the benefits of mediation

Many countries struggle to convince litigants of the benefit of resolving matters out of court, and especially through a consensual approach such as mediation.  That struggle may well be far greater in the context of international family mediation.  The level of suspicion of lawyers will increase dramatically.  Although many international family lawyers would fully endorse mediation in their national cases, there is fairly little work going on if the case is international. 

It also cannot be ignored bluntly that international family disputes invariably have substantial costs; this is one reason for the commitment by the steering group for this Project to help these cases to be sorted out in mediation.  Sadly the prospect of losing these high cross-border litigation costs might incline some lawyers not to be so favourable to the promotion of international mediation.  The realities have to be faced.  It might be that the international families, the lawyers’ clients, maybe far more keen to use mediation and want to know what can be done.

In fact, some of the very real difficulties and obstacles facing international families reach a settlement argue for the benefits of resolving through mediation.  Yet an international family facing a dispute but wanting to resolve through mediation will struggle to find a way forward, whether that is a suitable experienced mediator or a model of mediation or even an association of international family mediators.

Accordingly, a lot of work is necessary to educate and create awareness.  The education process may well be to the national and international lawyers.  This will be potentially very hard.  The awareness process will be to have good information available for international families about the benefits of resolving through out-of-court means.  Naturally it will build on the many lessons learned around the world with the challenge to convince people to resolve out of national courts.

If any would like to join a working party to bring about education and awareness, for international families themselves and separately to legal professions and justice systems, to consider how best this can be accomplished and perhaps produce easy to read explanations of the benefit in the international context, please get in touch.